Nobody claps for the resurfacing, and that is fine, because everybody notices when it is not done. A 200-metre reel of Head Hawk 17g is the same species of unglamorous virtue: co-polyester monofilament at 1.25 mm, 660 feet of it, roughly sixteen racquets' worth.
Seventeen gauge is the sensible middle — more feel and bite than 16, more life than 18 — with a control-first response and dependable tension behaviour. Buy the reel and you stop rationing fresh strings, which is the cheapest upgrade in the sport.
Banda Aceh knows about rebuilding, and it does not do it for the applause.
We begin at the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, brilliant white with seven black domes and slender minarets over a marble plaza of retractable parasols. The sultanate's mosque stood here until Dutch forces burned it in the assault of 1873, the war in which the Dutch general Köhler was killed at its gates.
To placate Acehnese anger the Dutch built a replacement, finished in 1881 to a design by the Italian architect Gerrit Bruins, and the population at first refused to use it. It has been enlarged repeatedly to the seven domes it carries now.
On 26 December 2004 the tsunami inundated the city and killed well over sixty thousand people here; the mosque stood, and sheltered thousands of survivors.
Then the Aceh Tsunami Museum, opened in 2009 to a competition-winning design by the Indonesian architect Ridwan Kamil.
It is raised on piles so that it can serve as an escape structure, and you enter through the Space of Fear, a dark curving corridor between high walls with water pouring down both of them, before reaching a chamber inscribed with the names of the dead under a light well open to the sky.
The exhibits document a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra and a wave that killed some two hundred and twenty-seven thousand people across fourteen countries.
Then the PLTD Apung 1, a floating diesel power plant of around two thousand six hundred tonnes that was moored off the city that morning and was carried some five kilometres inland, coming to rest on top of houses in the Punge Blang Cut neighbourhood. Rather than dismantle it, they kept the vessel exactly where it landed, with a viewing platform, a memorial garden and a clock stopped at the moment the water arrived.
And we finish at the Gunongan, a small white multi-tiered structure of rounded petal-like stone forms in a walled garden beside the river, built in the early seventeenth century by Sultan Iskandar Muda, under whom Aceh was a maritime power trading pepper across the Indian Ocean and challenging the Portuguese at Malacca.
Tradition holds he built it for his Pahang-born consort, homesick for the hills of her country, so that she could climb an artificial mountain. Nothing else in Indonesian architecture looks remotely like it.
You will work through this reel everywhere from a hard court in Banda Aceh to an indoor hall down in Medan, and by the way, it is also perfect for a glass of Acehnese coffee at the hour when the whole city is out and nobody is discussing the groundwork that made the evening possible.
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